The Blitz and the Westerly Route to Dulles
My last day in London was very sunny but also very cold. In the morning I walked from Covent Garden to St. Paul's without either getting lost OR accidentally visiting Trafalgar Square. This was a major accomplishment. St. Paul's is definitely my favorite thing in London -- it's so big but it is all crammed into the old streets that you can only catch occasional glimpse of it until you are actually there. It's sort of like the way you come upon the Pantheon in Rome. Little winding streets, darkness, cobblestones, more winding streets, and then you come around a corner WHAMMO! There it is.
I couldn't see much of St, Paul's because there was a ton of scaffolding up inside for some reason. But it has great mosaics and there was an Anglican priest saying prayers in an extremely British accent. It was hard not to giggle. It was like that scene in Monty Python -- "Dear God, thou art, SOOO big, thou art, SOOO powerful...." The actual prayer he was reading was the one about how God gave names to all the animals -- which is, of course, also a Bob Dylan song. Weird. This Anglican priest said the word "cattle" in an extremely effective manner. It came out sounding like "kattul." Right after he said "kattul" someone came up and whispered something and so the priest started over and said "kattul" again. Very fun.
The most interesting thing I saw in the cathedral was the display about efforts to save St. Paul's from the German's during the Blitz. There are amazing photos of smoke and fire all around and
St. Paul's rising out of it all on the skyline. There are photos of the damage caused by the bombs that managed to hit. There is a very sad letter written by a member of the St. Paul's Guard -- the British men who manned the dome 24 hours a day and put out fires and saved the structure. It was very difficult to read -- the man wrote about how horrible it was to see German planes in the sky over London and to feel the bombs falling all around and then the man said, "Of course, I am bursting into tears every half and hour, but that is only physical." There was also a photo of the view form the top of St. Paul's over London -- and you could see the blimp that was tethered to Buckingham Palace to protect it. I wondered how a blimp (which doesn't have any guns and which one could pop, no?) could protect a palace from bombs, and I decided it must have been a geographical marker so that anti-aircraft people and American and British dogfighters would know where it was at all times. Anyway, it was all very moving.Then I walked out of St. Paul's and up Fleet Street and looked at all the British people and thought how amazing it was that we won the war and London was still English and how awful it must have been to live through that time.
I stopped at the office (which is on the Strand, across from India House and the BBC and next to the London School of Economics) and said bye to some folks and then went out to a quick lunch with one of the associates in our London office. We ate in Seven Dials. I really like Seven Dials.
Then I hopped back in a taxi and did the reverse route to Paddington Station and to Heathrow on the express train. Heathrow is a really awful airport. They don't post your gate number until about 15 minutes before boarding, so you have hours to sit around in a common waiting area with nothing much to do. My flight left at 4:30 and it was dark by 3:30 (Northern altitude) so there wasn't even anything to look at out the windows. Also, you go through many more security checks than here in the U.S. United had three United-only security checks before we even got to the waiting area at the gate.
Two things to report about the flight back:
1. We flew very far West and came almost straight down from the Hudson Bay in Canada over Ottawa, Syracuse, and the Finger Lakes. We were so far West we had to make a left turn (to the east) to land at Dulles. Do suppose the people living in Ottawa realize that some of the planes flying over them are en route from London to Dulles? I bet that would news to them.
2. The captain came on towards the end of the flight to explain the bankruptcy and to say Mileage Plus miles will still work and that everything will be "normal" from the customers perspective and that they really appreciate us flying with them and that they hope the bankruptcy protection will make the airline more competitive, etc. It was actually very moving. Poor United.
Now that I'm back, I've just learned that I will probably be spending two or three days next week in Los Angeles for work.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:24 AM
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